Jones & Bartlett Learning Health Blog

Keeping Up with Global Health – Some of the Best Resources You May Not Have Heard Of

Being a good teacher of Global Health requires that we keep current in our field. It also requires that we have access to good teaching materials. In this blog, I offer some suggestions about how to keep up to date in global health as painlessly as possible and where to find some valuable resources for helping you to create presentations on key Global Health topics.

The amount of information that comes out daily on global health is overwhelming. We are bombarded with news about global health problems and solutions in a variety of media. A typical day could contain an outbreak of drug-resistant TB in one country; drought and undernutrition in the Sahel; and, pronouncements by a donor government about new aid programs for addressing maternal health. It is hard not to “drown” in information or avoid spending all day just trying to make your way through it.

Over the years, a number of sources for information on global health have helped me keep up in the field - without killing myself doing so. These should be useful to experienced and less experienced teachers of Global Health.

One set of sources aggregates news about global health. One of the most useful of these is the “Kaiser Daily Global Health Policy Report.” It can be accessed via the web at: http://globalhealth.kff.org, or, you can sign up to have it delivered to your email inbox.

Global Health Hub is also a valuable aggregator of global health news. I also have a Google alert on “Global Health,” which has served me very well.

The Pan American Health Organization does a wonderful service by sending out a newsletter with references to new studies, reports, and journal articles on Global Health. These generally contain abstracts of the materials, so you can easily decide if they are useful for your teaching or research. You can access an archive of these studies and sign up for PAHO’s listserv at: http://listserv.paho.org/Archives/equidad.html

Robert Davis, a former UNICEF staff now resident in Nairobi, publishes newsletters on child survival and on vaccination. What I especially like about these newsletters is Robert’s ability to share articles and materials that provide historical context or are especially thought provoking. The set of newsletters is available at: www.childsurvival.net

If you are someone who has taught global health for years, you may not need much help in putting together presentations, cases, and other materials to make your classes especially engaging. However, the Global Health arena is changing so fast that all faculty need to constantly update their course materials. The field of global health is also growing so fast that many faculty are developing new Global Health courses. In addition, a number of faculty with relatively little experience in Global Health are being called upon to teach it.

These presentations are done in a common format and usually cover a substantial amount of material. Although some of them may be more technical or medical than you would like for undergrads, many of them are appropriate for all levels of students.

Some of these presentations are excellent and it may make much more sense to use one of them, with credits and thanks to the authors, than to develop your own presentation on some subjects.

The companion teacher’s website for my book – Global Health 101– includes a PowerPoint presentation for each chapter of the book, as well as a separate collection for faculty use of all of the tables and figures used in the book. Click here to request access to this website without having to use the book.

This is the first of a series of monthly blogs that will focus on teaching Global Health.

In the next few blogs, I plan to share additional information I hope you will find useful about data sources and about self-paced Global Health instructional materials, Global Health videos, the visual presentation of information, and case studies in Global Health.

* Thanks TO Professors Richard Riegelman and Victor Barbiero for their thoughts on this blog.

Richard Skolnik is a Lecturer at the Yale School of Public Health, where he teaches global health courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Richard was previously an Instructor in Global Health at The George Washington University, the Vice President for International Programs at the Population Reference Bureau, and the Executive Director of the Harvard School of Public Health PEPFAR program. Richard worked at the World Bank from 1976 to 2001, last serving as the Director for Health and Education for South Asia. Richard is the author of Global Health 101 a comprehensive, introductory text on global health.